A domain of knowledge, e.g., customer and asset/financial information for banking, may be defined or organized in an ontology or format. An ontology may comprise concepts or classes, which may be organized in a tree, wherein each concept having a parent is a species of its parent, e.g., customer (parent), business customer (first species) and private individual customer (second species). Each concept may be associated with one or more instances, e.g., an instance for “business customer” may be “Ace Computer Store” and an instance for “individual customer” may be “John Doe.” Each concept may also have one or more attributes. For example, the attributes for “individual customer” may comprise name, address, and social security number. Typically, different organizations operating within the same domain have different ontologies, i.e., each ontology comprises concepts and/or attributes defined differently, yet may receive similar or substantially the same information. In order to enable two organizations or entities to interact with one another and exchange information, mappings between their different ontologies are required.